Communications networks are widely used for nationwide and worldwide communication of voice, multimedia and/or data. As used herein, the term “communications networks” includes public communications networks, such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), terrestrial and/or satellite cellular networks, private networks and/or the Internet.
The Internet is a decentralized network of computers that can communicate with one another via Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet includes the World Wide Web (web) service facility, which is a client/server-based facility that includes a large number of servers (computers connected to the Internet) on which web pages or files reside, as well as clients (web browsers), which interface users with the web pages. The topology of the web can be described as a network of networks, with providers of network services called Network Service Providers, or NSPs. Servers that provide application-layer services may be referred to as Application Service Providers (ASPs). Sometimes a single service provider provides both functions.
Vast amounts of information or “content” are available on the web including, but not limited to text, images, applications, video, and audio content. Web users are also increasingly making their own personal content (e.g., home movies, photograph albums, audio recordings, etc.) available via the web through web sites, web logs (blogs), and the like. In addition, television networks, including traditional broadcast networks as well as cable and satellite television networks, are making content available via the web. Unfortunately, the sheer amount of available content and the increasing numbers of content providers are posing increasingly more difficult challenges to users with respect to finding content of interest.
Recent studies have uncovered some alarming facts with regard to how much time and money are spent by enterprise employees engaged in finding information. For example, the average knowledge worker spends 50 percent of his/her time looking for information. The number of copies an organization makes of each document averages 19. In an IDC (www.idc.com) report, entitled “The High Cost of Not Finding Information,” it is demonstrated that an enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers can lose anywhere from $2.5 million $3.5 million annually in intellectual rework, time spent searching for non-existent data, and failing to find existing information. The lost opportunity costs, however, are even greater—an additional $15 million in lost revenues. In another IDC report, entitled “Quantifying Enterprise Search”, it was found that only 21% of respondents said they found the information they needed 85% to 100% of the time. 40% of corporate users reported that they can not find the information they need to do their jobs on their enterprise intranets.
The concept of “social tagging” has emerged recently and describes the collaborative activity of marking shared online content with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering, or search. Traditional information architecture utilized a central taxonomy or classification scheme in order to place information into specific pre-defined buckets or categories. The assumption was that trained librarians understood more about information content and context than the average user. While this might have been true for the local library with the utilization of the Dewey Decimal system, the enormous amount of content on the Internet makes this type of system un-manageable.
Social tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community. Perhaps the most important feature to the individual is the ability to bookmark information in a way that is easy to recall at a later date. In addition, by combining social tags, users can create an environment where the opinions of the majority define the appropriateness of the tags themselves. The act of creating a collection of popular tags is referred to as a folksonomy which is defined as a folk taxonomy of important and emerging content within a user community. Unfortunately, a vocabulary problem exists because different users may define content in different ways which may lead to missed information or inefficient user interactions.
An example of social tagging is the Web site “Flickr” (www.flickr.com), which allows users to upload images and “tag” them with appropriate metadata keywords. Other users, who view the images, can also tag them with their concept of appropriate keywords. After a critical mass has been reached, the resulting tag collection will identify images correctly and without bias. Another Web site dedicated to social bookmarking is delicious, which provides users with a place to store, categorize, annotate and share favorite Web pages and files.
Social tagging can be a beneficial way to locate content if users understand the context and tagging of information. On the Internet, where social tagging emerged, there may be a pool of several thousand people engaged in the social tagging of content. Because of the large number of participants, the vocabulary and context of tags utilized will generally be understood by most users. However, in the corporate environment, there may be a much smaller number of users who engage in social tagging of internal content (i.e., content on the corporate intranet) and external content (i.e., content on the Internet). For example, in a large corporation of several thousand people, there may be fewer than one hundred users engaged in social tagging. The vocabulary and context of tags created by the few engaged in social tagging may not be understood by others in the corporation seeking content.